A summer in India. We had so many hopes, so many picture postcard ideas: the jazz of vividly coloured saris; the calls of chai wallahs in the old bazaars and the smells of rich Indian cooking served on bright banana leaves. Whatever.
On the train from Pushkar to Chandigarh the nightmare began. The colour slowly drained from my boyfriend’s face. Sweat lashed from his forehead. Returning from the toilet he reported that he HAD to get off the train. As we drew closer to the next stop – Delhi – he began to vomit – at great length.
Anyone who has ever been to a train station in India – especially at night – will know how grim it is. Unbelievable poverty everywhere. Men grope you. Rats crawl over your feet as flying cockroaches bat off your head and scuttle down your t-shirt. I stumbled down Dehli’s old bazaar with my luggage, my boyfriend’s luggage and my boyfriend propped over both shoulders. People tugged at my shirt, I stumbled into puddles filled with human faeces and, believe it or not, I collided with a stray cow’s horn. I pulled us into the first ‘hotel’ I could find. The man offered us all manner of illegal substances and he highly recommended a ‘bang lassi’ – we declined. The bathroom wall had an easily climb through-able hole in it and two migrant workers were asleep on the balcony. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. I think you can probably guess what the sheets were like. My boyfriend moaned and hallucinated himself to sleep as I perched on the end of the bed and wondered how the hell we could get out of there.
The next morning, my boyfriend stopped vomiting long enough for me to persuade him to get out of Dehli. Let’s go to the mountains! The Himalayas. Cool, fresh air and beautiful, panoramic views. It was an Indian ‘honeymoon’ destination and – what the hey - we booked into a honeymooners hotel. Bliss.
We took the ‘toy train’ – a single gauge railway to Shimla. I could have out walked the damn train. ‘Toy’ was not a quaint, jokey adjective – our knees were up to our chin and our backpacks strained on our backs. It was then that the sweat began to form on my forehead. I spent the best part of the eight hour journey vomiting through the hole in the floor of the train which passed as a toilet directly onto the tracks – with my backpack still on my back.
It was no honeymoon. The hotel was rancid. We were too weak to move anywhere and, rather romantically, we took turns to vomit and explode with diarrhoea in the squat toilet. There was no shower, just a giant bucket full of icy water and we took turns pouring glacial cups over each other to wash away the spew.
On the train from Pushkar to Chandigarh the nightmare began. The colour slowly drained from my boyfriend’s face. Sweat lashed from his forehead. Returning from the toilet he reported that he HAD to get off the train. As we drew closer to the next stop – Delhi – he began to vomit – at great length.
Anyone who has ever been to a train station in India – especially at night – will know how grim it is. Unbelievable poverty everywhere. Men grope you. Rats crawl over your feet as flying cockroaches bat off your head and scuttle down your t-shirt. I stumbled down Dehli’s old bazaar with my luggage, my boyfriend’s luggage and my boyfriend propped over both shoulders. People tugged at my shirt, I stumbled into puddles filled with human faeces and, believe it or not, I collided with a stray cow’s horn. I pulled us into the first ‘hotel’ I could find. The man offered us all manner of illegal substances and he highly recommended a ‘bang lassi’ – we declined. The bathroom wall had an easily climb through-able hole in it and two migrant workers were asleep on the balcony. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. I think you can probably guess what the sheets were like. My boyfriend moaned and hallucinated himself to sleep as I perched on the end of the bed and wondered how the hell we could get out of there.
The next morning, my boyfriend stopped vomiting long enough for me to persuade him to get out of Dehli. Let’s go to the mountains! The Himalayas. Cool, fresh air and beautiful, panoramic views. It was an Indian ‘honeymoon’ destination and – what the hey - we booked into a honeymooners hotel. Bliss.
We took the ‘toy train’ – a single gauge railway to Shimla. I could have out walked the damn train. ‘Toy’ was not a quaint, jokey adjective – our knees were up to our chin and our backpacks strained on our backs. It was then that the sweat began to form on my forehead. I spent the best part of the eight hour journey vomiting through the hole in the floor of the train which passed as a toilet directly onto the tracks – with my backpack still on my back.
It was no honeymoon. The hotel was rancid. We were too weak to move anywhere and, rather romantically, we took turns to vomit and explode with diarrhoea in the squat toilet. There was no shower, just a giant bucket full of icy water and we took turns pouring glacial cups over each other to wash away the spew.
